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Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
Her position, to lead and possibly to know more than us, must have been difficult and lonely.
All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk,
anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality reassured them, anchored them.
it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful.
I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful.
bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning.
some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
As an adult, sitting on the roof of my cottage near the bay, and later, haunting the empty lot, I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.
My free will was compromised, if only by the severe temptation of the unknown. To have quit that place, to have returned to the surface, without rounding that corner … my imagination would have tormented me forever. In that moment, I had convinced myself I would rather die knowing … something, anything.
had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me.
It is difficult to tell what blanks my mind might be filling in just to remove the weight of so many unknowns.
“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”
These things are real and not real. They exist and they do not exist. I remake them in my mind with every new thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are slightly different. Sometimes they are camouflage or disguises. Sometimes they are something more truthful.
I was continually reimagining the world even then,
the narcissism of our human gaze,
If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask.
Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.
